After Hillary Clinton's aide Huma Abedin was forced to plead ignorance over emails on her sexting husband's laptop. Since then it raises question whether it is completely safe to share your emails with your partner.
The disaster in question is potentially catastrophic. Using the family laptop for work may have cost her friend and boss a clear run at the presidency and handed Donald Trump the keys to the White House, not to mention the nuclear codes.
Federal investigators looking into Abedin's estranged husband's emails to an underage girl found messages from Clinton that they must now also examine. Abedin didn't realise that the laptop used by her husband, the pertinently named Anthony Weiner, was synced up to her work emails. As Abedin has learned, no matter how much you love someone, some things are not for sharing.
Open accounts are riven with potential pitfalls. Take Woman A. She recently received a text from Airbnb telling her Sabine in Copenhagen was delighted to accept her request to book a room for a romantic break. This was news to Woman A, who was planning to spend that weekend painting her kitchen in Haringey while her partner was on a business trip. He had been so preoccupied with lying to her about his extra-curricular shagging that he didn't log out of their shared Airbnb account.
Even if you are doing something innocent it's easy to reveal more than you intend. One south Londoner had been passing tedious commutes with her Kindle, deeply engrossed in a novel about a steamy affair. Then she received an upset call from her boyfriend. He had opened his app and been alerted to numerous new highlighted passages, all about the tragedy of being trapped in a loveless relationship. No matter how many times she told him she'd only wanted to remember how elegant the writer's syntax was he still smarted. Don't link accounts with your parents for the same reasons
Being share-aware extends to naming accounts. This is a high-risk area. Man A still blushes when he remembers the time he generously let his flatmate catch up with Stranger Things on his Netflix account, forgetting that his girlfriend had changed his account name to DJ Furry Babykins. That was two months ago — and the furry DJ says he has yet to recover his dignity.
The same goes for email addresses. You might appear to be a trustworthy, intelligent team member who is ripe for promotion but if your boss receives an email from your jokey personal account gossip_queen69@aol.com it could jeopardise all your hard work.
Woman X recently scored an own goal. She sent her partner a screenshot of the holiday cabin she wanted them to rent over Christmas, forgetting that she'd also been Googling "how to make sex less boring" and left the tab open. No one came out of it well.
This is why pro Mumsnetters advocate private browsing. YANBU ("you are not being unreasonable", for the uninitiated to Mumsnetese) for protecting your darling husband from what you've been crowdsourcing opinion on. Users also baulk at the idea of opening up their computers to the family.
Technology means there's little room for lies. It's no good promising your life partner that you're holding out so that you can watch the latest instalment of Narcos together if she then opens the laptop to find the last three episodes in the helpful Recently Watched section.
Ideally you won't have anything to hide — but if that's unrealistic it's time to put your computer on lockdown.
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